Chapter 1 - Our Greatest Fear

A wise man thinks of nothing less than death.

- Spinoza

Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton ...

- Marcus Aurelius

When life is full and we are young, a bright world surrounds us, open to inquiry. Only in the far distance is there a speck of darkness, a missing point of the picture. But as we age, this speck grows larger. As our lives draw to a close, this region of darkness fills the ground before us like the opening of a forbidding cave. Others have entered that cave before us - billions of others, including our relatives and friends - and it is claimed even that some have returned from a brief sortie across its threshold during so-called near-death experiences (NDEs) or, less convincingly, as ghosts. Yet, despite what comfort we may choose to draw from accounts of NDEs, tales of spiritual manifestations, or the reassurances of various religions, most of us remain deeply uncertain, and afraid, as to what lies ahead. Death is the great question mark at the end of life, the mystery we long to solve but seem unable to. And yet it is an event, a transition, a portal, we must each go through sooner or later. It is a question that, in the end, holds an answer for every one of us.

Your death became a future fact at the moment a particular sperm cell from your father united with a particular ovum inside your mother. At that instant your personal hourglass was upturned and the sands of your life began to fall. Now no matter how hard you try to stay vigorous in body and mind, it will not affect the final outcome. No amount of progress to combat the effects of aging, through drugs, surgery, or other means, can do more than briefly postpone the inevitable. Your body is destined progressively to wear out and ultimately to fail. And then?

As soon as a person's heart stops beating, gravity takes hold. Within minutes a purple-red stain starts to appear on the lowermost parts of the body, where blood quickly settles. The skin and muscles sag, the body cools, and within two to six hours rigor mortis sets in. Beginning with a stiffening of the eyelids, the rigidity extends inexorably to all parts of the body and may last for between one and four days before the muscles finally relax.

Two or three days after death, a greenish discoloration of the skin on the right side of the lower abdomen above the cecum (the part of the large intestine nearest the surface) provides the first visible sign of decay. This gradually spreads over the whole abdomen and then on to the chest and upper thighs, the color being simply a result of sulfur-containing gases from the intestines reacting with hemoglobin liberated from the blood in the vessels of the abdominal wall. By the end of the first week, most of the body is tinged green, a green that steadily darkens and changes to purple and finally to black. Blood-colored blisters, two to three inches across, develop on the skin, the merest touch being sufficient to cause their top layer to slide off.

By the end of the second week the abdomen is bloated. The lungs rupture because of bacterial attack in the air passages, and the resulting release of gas pressure from within the body forces a blood-stained fluid from the nose and mouth - a startling effect that helped to spawn many a vampire legend among peasants who had witnessed exhumations in medieval Europe. The eyes bulge and the tongue swells to fill the mouth and protrude beyond the teeth. After three to four weeks, the hair, nails, and teeth loosen, and the internal organs disintegrate before turning to liquid.

On average, it takes ten to twelve years for an unembalmed adult body buried six feet deep in ordinary soil without a coffin to be completely reduced to a skeleton. This period may shrink dramatically to between a few months and a year if the grave is shallow, since the body is then more accessible to maggots and worms. However, soil chemistry, humidity, and other ambient factors have a powerful effect on the rate of decomposition. Acid water and the almost complete absence of oxygen in peat, for instance, make it an outstanding preservative. From Danish peat bogs alone, more than 150 well-kept bodies up to five thousand years old have been recovered in the last two centuries. And likewise, astonishingly fresh after five millennia was "Otzi the Iceman," found in 1991, complete with skin tattoos and Bronze Age tool kit, trapped in a glacier in the Otztal Alps on the Austro-Italian border.

Accidental preservations aside, people throughout the ages have frequently gone to surprising lengths to ensure that their corpses remained in good shape. Most famously, the ancient Egyptians were obsessed by corporeal preservation, to the extent of mummifying not just themselves but also many kinds of animals which they held to be sacred. The underground labyrinths of Tuna-el-Gebel, for instance, are eerily crowded with the mummies of baboons and ibis. Incredibly, at least four million of the latter went through the elaborate embalming process - a process that made copious use of the dehydrating salt natron, excavated from around the Nile and parched desert lakes.

All mummies preserved by the old Egyptian method are very long dead - with one bizarre exception. In 1995, the Egyptologist and philosopher Robert Brier of Long Island University completed the first mummification in this traditional style in more than 2,000 years. His subject was a seventy-six-year-old American who had given his body to science. Brier went to great pains to follow the old methods, traveling to Egypt to harvest his natron (principally a mixture of sodium carbonate and bicarbonate) from the dry shores of Wadi Natrun, and using authentic replicas of embalming tools from the first millennium BC. Just as the mortician-priests of the pharaonic tombs would have done, Brier drew out the man's brain (The Egyptians discarded the brain because they drew no connection between it and the person's mind or soul. Mental life, they believed, was concentrated in the heart. To us this seems odd since it "feels" as if thought takes place inside our heads. If we concentrate hard for too long our headaches. Did the Egyptians experience "heartache" instead?) by way of the nostrils, extracted the major organs before storing them individually in canopic jars, and finally left the body for several weeks to completely dehydrate, swaddled and packed in the special salt. Only the subject's feet were visible, wrapped in blue surgical booties. Rejecting criticisms that his research was in poor taste, Brier claimed the experiment had shown beyond doubt that it is the action of natron, more than any other factor, that affords mummies their well-kept look.

The Romans, too, were familiar with the drying and preservative properties of certain chemicals. So-called plaster burials, in which lime or chalk (both drying agents) or gypsum (a natural antiseptic) was packed around the body in the coffin, have turned up in Roman cemeteries in Britain and North Africa.

More recently, wealthy Victorians went to enormous trouble to carefully dispose of their corpses. Burial in crypts and catacombs came into fashion - and not only because it gave the well-heeled, through the ostentatious grandeur of family vaults, a way to display their social standing. There were more sinister reasons to try to ensure a safe place for burial. Locked doors were a deterrent to body snatchers who might otherwise hawk your remains for illegal medical dissection or, worse, pry out your teeth for use in making dentures. Also, the Victorians had an acute fear of being buried alive - better, they reasoned, to revive in a room with some chance of escape than in a horribly cramped coffin piled over with earth.

It is no coincidence that the average interval between death and burial in Britain lengthened from about five days in the late eighteenth century to eight days in the early nineteenth century. The object was to allow plenty of time for obvious signs of decay to develop, which would serve a dual purpose: to reassure relatives that their loved one was indeed dead and also to render the body less desirable to thieves.

People at this time often included in their wills bizarre requests concerning the disposal of their bodies. They would ask, for instance, that bells be attached to their corpse or that a razor be used to cut into the flesh of their foot to make absolutely sure they were not still alive before being interred. And in Imperial Russia perhaps the most wonderfully eccentric precaution of all was dreamed up to counter the possibility of premature burial. In 1897, having witnessed the remarkable revival of a young girl during her funeral, Count Karnice-Karnicki, chamberlain to the czar, patented his "life-signaling coffin." The slightest movement of the occupant's chest would trigger a spring-loaded ball, causing a box on the surface connected to the spring by a tube to open, thereby letting light and air into the coffin. The spring was also designed to release a flag on the surface, a bell that would ring for half an hour, and a lamp that would burn after sunset. Alas, history does not record if the count's ingenious invention ever left the drawing board.

Our choice of whether to be buried or not may be made on purely aesthetic grounds. We may be somewhat comforted by the idea of our bodies returning to nature as part of the grand recycling process. Alternatively, we may find the thought of being consumed by insects and bacteria too revolting to contemplate and, as a result, opt for a less organic mode of disposal. But, for some people, burial after death is important for religious reasons. Most obviously, according to Christian...